Hespira

by Matthew Hughes

  The panel met, the case was presented, witnesses told their salty tales before a room-filling throng, and judgment was duly delivered. Somehow, based apparently solely on his own high opinion of his worth and the utter probity of his actions, Issus Khal had expected to be absolved. So, when the tally sticks were passed to the head of the bench, with each and every one of them found to be black—not even one gray amongst them, let alone a white—the condemned threw what Razhamans called “the full bubble” of raging fit, hurling insults and imprecations in every direction, and threatening dire retribution on all concerned.

  He was hauled away, still foaming and spitting, to the incarcery. But scarcely had be begun the program of withy-weaving and coarse stitchery mandated for mankillers, than unknown persons entered the institution under cloak of darkness and took him away. Dawn found his private yacht gone from the spaceport, as was his almost-grown son, Imrith, and their body servants. They were not heard from again, although some months later, each of the members of the adjudication panel, as well as several supposed friends of Khal’s who had declined to sit, received a vindicat. This was the traditional instrument by which Razhamans of superlant rank formally announced a vendetta: a small wooden box, delivered anonymously to the target’s doorstep, which when opened would be found to contain an unwholesome substance that had been personally produced by the sender.

  All this the clerk imparted to me in hushed tones, his eyes glancing here and there about the almost empty lobby. “I see,” I said, when the contents of the vindicat had been explained to me, “and you thought that my companion and I might be participants in another such drama.”

  “One sees few of the highest ranks outside their exclusive milieus,” he said. “One might not recognize a lady who, until now, has kept herself within the ambit.” He explained that that was the term for the tightly circumscribed social circle in which moved the loftiest Razhamans.

  “Please be assured,” I said, “that such is not the case. We are merely offworlders who took local advice on how to present ourselves. In all likelihood, we will be gone tomorrow.”

  I passed him three sequints and went to rejoin Hespira. I was thinking that the tale he had told explained the whispers and sidelong glances at the Greeneries. It might also throw some perspective on the interest shown by the man atop Candyk’s Spire. A Razhaman woman appearing in public with a masked escort was an irresistible stimulus to these people’s fascination with tittle-tat. The man in brown may have rushed off to tell his drinking mates of the newsworthy sight he had seen.

  There was another, more worrisome, possibility. Suppose the long-suffering spouse of some neglectful local superlant had taken herself off to the cloister with a threat to appear in public? The dominee might have agents out to inform him if she made good on the threat. Hespira and I might be mistaken for the errant lady and her paramour, an error that could take a potentially dangerous turn before the innocent truth was discovered.

  The clerk was watching me as I thought, no doubt storing impressions to be passed on to whomever he knew who might be agog at the doings of offworlders. Another question occurred to me, and I put it to him: were the amorous customs on Shannery similar to those on Ikkibal?

  The alarm on his face told me the answer even before he leaned closer and whispered, “Not at all! They are animals, coupling higgledy-piggledy, without consideration of rank. They wouldn’t know a decent pause if it came in with trumpets and clashing cymbals.”

  I returned to my client and we went into the ascender. As we rose, I told her of the Khal Affair and the inferences the patrons of the Greeneries must have drawn from our appearance there. She found the business quite amusing; coupled with the clerk’s description of affairs on Shannery, that was another point that argued for her being a native of that secondary world.

  “We will go there in the morning,” I said, opening the door to my room. She entered with me, intending to pass through the closed connecting door to hers. “I am confident that—” I continued only to be interrupted by a tiny point of light that flashed briefly against my retina: a silent signal from my assistant, which I had left in its armature draped over the back of a chair.

  I made a small series of motions, a code that prompted the integrator to begin to play a prerecorded, innocuous conversation in which we discussed the speculations of Immeriot, an early Twentieth-Aeon philosopher who had been struck by a vision that led him to believe that the universe was some kind of giant seed that would someday sprout into a remarkable plant. Other sages had dared him to prove that this odd contention was true, but he had waved them all off, saying, “Prove that it isn’t!” and cackling in a manner that set his colleagues’ gears to grinding. Meanwhile, I signaled to Hespira that she should remain still and not speak.

  “There has been an incident,” the integrator said, so that only I could hear. “In the client’s room.”

  I kept a small shocker fixed to a harness strapped to my right forearm. I flexed my wrist now and the weapon slid forward into my palm, and when I closed my fist the emitter poked through my fingers. I faced the connecting door, then half-turned my head toward my assistant.

  I moved my lips without sound. “What kind of incident?”

  “Something entered the room and moved about.”

  “Something?” I expected more precision.

  “It was clouded,” the integrator said.

  “It must have been well clouded if you were not able to pierce through the obfuscation.”

  “Indeed, it was a high-order system. I did not recognize the type.”

  That raised all kinds of points to be considered, but I dealt with the most important first. “Is it still there?”

  “No.”

  “Did it leave anything behind?”

  “A surveillance device, also clouded, also high-order. I have been unpicking it, but it is complex.”

  “Anything else to report?”

  “From an analysis of the intruder device’s motions, I believe it searched the room.”

  “A nominal search or intensive?”

  “By the length of time, intensive.”

  “Hmm,” I said.

  Hespira had been watching my lips move. “What is—” she began.

  Again I signaled her to silence but saw her react with annoyance. I picked up my assistant and draped it over my shoulders, then indicated that we should go out into the hallway, the discussion of Immeriot’s Theorem still ongoing. We had reached the point in the discussion where the old sage had pointed out that, to us denizens of the cosmos, it mattered not a whit what its nature was, nor what it might later become. To quote Immeriot: “It is as hugely irrelevant to us as the literary outpourings of a poet are to a bacterium living in his lower bowel. Indeed, to an even tinier mite living in the bacterium’s vacuole. It just doesn’t matter.”

  With this going on, I took her arm and walked her back to the ascenders where, judging the distance sufficient, I put my lips to her ear and explained the situation in whispers. She stiffened in fear and my fingers, resting in the crook of her elbow, felt the dampness of a sudden rush of perspiration. Once again, I was unexpectedly affected by emotion, experiencing an urge to protect her, an impetus so strong that I realized that I had unconsciously turned to put myself between her and the hallway down which we had just come, the hand holding the shocker half-raised, though there was no threat.

  I mastered the impulse and spoke again in her ear. “We will go back to my room where you will wait while I, wearing my assistant, enter your room. I believe there is no danger; it is only a surveillance device. But we will take all precautions.”

  She took a deep breath and showed me that she was ready. We did as I said we would, she remaining just inside the door of my room while I passed through the connector to hers, the Immeriot discourse still in play. With my assistant closer to the intruder’s left-behind and coming at it from another angle, we were able to identify the tiny spots at which the clouded device poked minuscule-but-po
werful percepts through the web of woven energies—for the disadvantage of a clouded device is that it can neither send nor receive information through its own cloud. Now my integrator was able to insinuate its influence through the cloud. As I had expected, the device turned out to be a sophisticated form of peeper, able to detect not just visible light and audible sound, but emanations in several other spectra; it could register vibrations as subtle as the small motions of a subject’s digestive tract or read the trace chemicals from an exhaled breath, allowing the receiver of all this information to deduce much about the person under observation.

  The peeper was almost as good as some that I had myself designed and built. But since we had penetrated its disguising emanations without its being aware that we had done so, we could now begin to feed it a set of false impressions. It came to believe that Hespira had come into the room and was preparing to retire, while the integrator and I nattered on about cosmic seeds and the possible shapes of the grand blooms that they promised. It protruded its tiny emitter and began to report its news to a remote receiver.

  I went back into my room and closed the connecting door. I let the Immeriot blather wind down, now that we could speak openly.

  “Who has put that device in my room?” Hespira said. The anxiety in her voice disturbed me but I maintained a calm and professional aspect. “And why?”

  “It may be,” I said, “a result of your costume. Some upper-tier husband, whose spouse has left him for the cloister, hears that a woman has been seen out and about, dressed as you are, and takes steps to determine if the problem she presents is his.”

  She was only a little relieved. “Is that likely?”

  “It is a reasonable explanation.”

  But I knew it was not the only logical rationale. The incident had taken me by surprise—an eventuality that, however rare, I never cared to admit to—and I was belatedly turning my mind toward a full consideration of where we were and what we were doing.

  I had been remiss. I had made assumptions and acted upon them, and now it appeared that I had been wrong to do so. For example, I had assumed that the difficulties with Massim Shar and Irslan Chonder had been safely left behind on Old Earth, because although either might discover that I had gone offworld, it was unlikely that either would be able to discover where I had gone. But perhaps one, or even both, of them had been better than I had given them credit for. They might well still see me as a piece in whatever game of deadly pride they were playing.

  There was another possibility, however. I had early on come to the conclusion that Hespira’s memory had been taken from her by some outside agent; it was not the sort of thing one person did to another out of kindness, and I could only think of the perpetrator as her enemy, and therefore mine. But I had chosen to defer the question of who that adversary might be until I had determined who Hespira was. I had assumed that, once dumped on far-away Old Earth, she had ceased to matter to whoever had done the dumping. I now saw that that could have been a substantial error in judgment—a lapse that I might not have made had I still been equipped with my old insight.

  I am not what I was, I told myself, and I must remember to compensate for my loss.

  “For safety’s sake,” I informed Hespira, “you should sleep in my room tonight. My assistant will keep watch, and I am armed.”

  For once she did not offer any suspicion at my motives, and I hoped that my conduct had finally convinced her that I did not desire her physically. She wanted to get some night things from her room and, shocker in hand, I accompanied her there and back again. Soon, after a certain amount of shuttling between the main room and the attached sanitary suite, she was at rest on the sleeping pallet and I was curled up in a chair that did its best to accommodate me, once it realized that I was attempting to sleep in it.

  But first I consulted my assistant, using our silent method of communication. “Extend your awareness to encompass the hotel and its environs,” I said.

  “Done.”

  “Is the surveillance device reporting to a receiver in the hotel?”

  “No, to a floater high above. It relays the signal via a focused beam.”

  “To where?”

  “To what I take to be a vehicle parked on a disused property in an industrial zone. It too is well clouded.”

  “I assume you cannot dispel the clouding from this distance?”

  “Correct.”

  The set-up had all the marks of a professional. I chose a course of action. “Contact Chumblot,” I said, “Tell him that tomorrow I will arise early and that I will expect him at the rear of the hotel at daybreak. Tell him that there may be a substantial bonus for him.”

  A moment later my assistant said, “He is unavailable, but his integrator has accepted the message.”

  “Maintain vigilance; I especially wish to know if the receiver’s vehicle moves.”

  #

  I awoke short of breath in the thin light of a Razhaman dawn and took another of the oxygen supplements. Hespira slept on, but the disarranged covers of the sleeping pallet showed that she had passed a restless night. I drew the covers up to her chin and left a supplement where she would see it upon awakening. Then I spoke in silent mode to my assistant. “What of Chumblot?”

  “No reply.”

  “Try him again.”

  “The result is the same.”

  I could not wait for the driver. I would go down to the rear of the hotel, in case he had received my message and acted upon it without acknowledgement. If he was not there, I decided that I would not have the hotel find me another driver; I would hire a vehicle and operate it myself.

  “You will remain here to continue to delude the peeper,” I told my assistant, “and be of service to our client if she awakens before I return.”

  With that, I descended to the hotel’s ground floor and found a service passageway that led to the rear of the building. Utility vehicles were coming and going, delivering supplies for the kitchens and laundry, but of Chumblot and his car there was no sign. I wondered if he had found a more lucrative assignment, or perhaps he felt that he had earned enough yesterday to entitle himself to a day of leisure. Years of travel up and down The Spray had taught me that attitudes toward getting and spending could vary widely from world to world.

  After one last look to make sure he was not parked behind some waste bins, I reentered the hotel and approached the front desk, where the night clerk was preparing to go off duty. Before she did so, she ordered me an aircar and said it would arrive shortly.

  I went back up to my room and awakened Hespira. She came out of a dream with a gasp, a hand raised as if to ward off an attack.

  “What is it?” I said. “What were you dreaming?”

  She gave me a blank, uncomprehending look, then recognition came into her eyes. I repeated my questions and saw her reaching back for the dream. But it was gone, leaving only an impression of being surrounded by enemies, hemmed in by threats.

  “Do you recall faces, voices?”

  She half sighed, half shuddered. “Only the feeling, the desperation of being trapped.”

  Her long face was drawn and gray. I urged her to take the oxygen supplement and in a few moments a healthier color returned to her skin. “Chumblot has not come,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “I cannot say. I have engaged an aircar. I will go and see what I can learn about whoever placed that device in your room.”

  “You will leave me alone?”

  “My assistant will be with you, and I will leave you the shocker.”

  “I don’t know how—”

  I took off the weapon and set it on a table. “It is self-aiming. My assistant will operate it remotely on your behalf, if you prefer.”

  She was sitting up on the pallet, the covers bunched around her legs, the smell of a night’s troubled sleep hovering around her. A frightened woman is never pretty, nor are most women in the first moments of the day, and since Hespira was already carrying a deficit in the attra
ctiveness ledger, this was not an occasion when she might have won hearts. And yet again I felt that strong sense of protectiveness. “Do not worry,” I said. “I will let no harm come to you.”

  My concern led me to enunciate detailed instructions to my assistant, which the integrator soon gave me to understand were unnecessary. “Until you return,” it said, “we will continue the research into conditions on Shannery.”

  I had let it slip my mind that I had set it to that task. But while we had visited Spire and Plunge, dined amid whispers and covert glances, then dealt with the matter of the peeper, my assistant had been in intermittent contact with ships going to and from the secondary world where they said “flippadiday” instead of “flippydedoo.”

  There were always delays in communications between worlds. On Ikkibal itself, or between the planet and its several satellites and myriad orbitals, communications were fast and full. But between Ikkibal and Shannery lay a vast gulf of emptiness, traversable only through a whimsy that lay about a day away at the normal speed of most ships in normal space and whose other end opened about a half-day’s passage from Shannery.

  The connectivity could not operate through whimsies, the only way to transmit a message from world to world was to entrust it to the integrator of a ship that was outbound from Ikkibal for Shannery. When that ship cleared the whimsy and was falling toward its destination, its integrator would pass all of its messages to the Shannery connectivity, to be delivered to their recipients. Responses would be handed to a ship bound for Ikkibal, which would dump them into that world’s communication system as soon as it was within range.